You’re right that this is a very American thing. But we are a huge country responsible for huge amounts of climate damage. Our parking lots are enormous. 5% of our entire country is parking lot, owned by companies that can sure as hell afford contractors, especially if there’s incentive.

Also, here, banning cars in city centers here often does NOT work. Even the city I live in tried it for decades - businesses constantly failed, there was no foot traffic despite being surrounded by residential communities and beautiful upkeeping of the town center. Once we opened it up to cars, suddenly it’s a flourishing area of local businesses and community organization. We as a nation are too focused on cars, yes. But changing that right now is absolutely not happening. There’s no alternative right now, and changing that has too much opposition to overcome. There has to be steps along the way. Covering massive bare parking lots in solar panels would absolutely be something we can get this country on board with.

It’s not a matter of who’s serious or not, it’s a matter of what is more attainable right now. Small steps are more achievable than massive ones. Public transportation and walkable cities are already a topic that capitalism has been fighting forever, and the amount of infrastructure that would need to change is massive. It would interrupt daily lives, close roads, probably close businesses at LEAST temporarily, and while those of us who support it would understand it’s a means to an end, there is absolutely no way to get everyone on board right now. We DO have car parks right now, on private property where the companies that own them likely have the cash to spare for contractors to build solar panels. We’d have some areas of parking lots coned off while they build, and it would be a huge improvement that will be much easier to attain than the kind of overhaul needed to transform cities.

I’m hopping between instances to try and find a suitable space to live and everywhere I go, I see talk about .world up at the top.

Regardless of personal takes on the situation that sparked this, I do think something’s got to give to decentralize Lemmy from .world. Scrolling through all popular communities is really not too dissimilar from just scrolling the communities in the .world instance alone.

I think that defederation from .world is in order, but from what I can tell, I’m not sure if this instance should be the first domino to fall. I think it would be a good move in the long run to encourage various instances to take part in hosting diverse and vibrant communities and share the load, but I think it would be a bit lonely and confusing at first.

To address the concern about “will this be to the detriment of queer folk?” to be honest I think the solution lies not just in whether we federate with .world or not, but instead with increasing the visibility and accessibility of the fediverse as a whole. Right now, there is not a lot of easy to find or digest documentation about how this whole world works. If we equip the queer community with the resources to embrace and be embraced by this technology, THAT is how we support it.